One of the great things about Android, is that it has a flexibility - especially with regard to the file system - that you don't get on iOS. It is, for example, perfectly possible to drag and drop video and music files over USB on to the SD card or internal storage of your phone. The problem comes when playing those files back. For music, the Android player is fine; for video you might want something more.

So look then to MX Player. It does one thing, and that's play your media, but specifically, videos.

MX Player

While there are quite a few video players on the Google Play, it's hard to pick the one that has a good range of format support, while still being both free and easy to use. MX Player couldn't make less of a fuss about itself if it tried.

It supports various hardware configurations too, so your phone will very likely be supported. It's able to use hardware or software decoding, which gives you two ways to get the best video performance. We found hardware decoding on out HTC One X - the US, Qualcomm powered version - was not great, but software decoding worked a charm.

Some phones need an additional codec pack too, but the software will ask you to download this, should it be needed. We have never needed to on any of our devices, and we've always been able to get video playing without any hassle.

Subtitles are also supported, so that's handy if you're watching something foreign, don't have great hearing, or just want to watch without disturbing anyone - or have forgotten your headphones. You can move and resize them too, which is handy, especially with every device having a different size and shape screen.

Quality was great too, although the HTC screen is fabulous, so that helped, but MX Player didn't do anything to rain on the parade, and that's all you can really ask of a video player.

We tested it on Ice Cream Sandwich, and it worked beautifully. The developer also claims that it's the first player that supports multi-core video decoding. As we've said, the quality is superb, so we believe them when they say it's using all the potential processing power of the phone.